Adventure. I am longing for an adventure on par with the kind I like to escape to in my books. I want to journey with Frodo or Maerad for a few days. I want to meet up with a "vegetarian" vampire in a Northwest rainforest. I am wracking my brain to think of the last truly adventurous thing I've done. Yes, yes - embarking on the journey of parenthood is one big adventure. Aside from the initial act of passion, parenthood is not really a throw caution to the wind, to hell with the consequences, now or never sort of adventure. It's more calculated.

 So I applied for a job less than a week ago. It was the perfect job in many ways. It was a combo of teaching, wilderness instruction, extracurricular assistance in music/theater, language arts (not my major, but a hobby) and advising. It was near my family, so the kids would have been able to hang with Nana and Pop a bunch. It would have been a beautiful place to live for a while, with access to good hiking/skiing within minutes. Randy was supportive, even though he would have been the most impacted by this shift.

As the sister of two airplane enthusiast brothers (goaded on by my father who could look at a dot in the sky and declare make/model), you'd think I would have learned the art of paper airplane construction. I confess that I was never very talented in that arena, despite the fact that both of my brothers were constantly creating these beautiful aerodynamic paper constructions. Hisctorically, I tried a few times, could only make the most basic model and decided not to subject myself to such sibling humiliation again.

I recall a friend and mentor of mine who talked about living in cold weather. He explained that the more you fight the cold by tensing your muscles, gritting your teeth, cursing as your nose hair freezes, the harder it will be to acclimate. Rather, he suggested, you needed to relax into the air, breathe deeply and allow the beauty of winter to find its way into your body. (I paraphrase.) Or take Yoga, for example. The longer you sit in a stretching pose, however awkward and agonizing it may initially feel, the looser and more comfortable your tightly wound limbs begin to feel.

The content of this blog is largely concerning breastfeeding, so be warned.

This must be payback for all the times I wondered what all those moms were whining about when it came to breastfeeding.